Wall Street Today | Wilmington Trust: Cash could be your friend

Stocks looked set for a mixed start Monday and oil slid amid concerns about more curbs to tackle the omicron virus variant, tightening monetary policy and a setback for President Joe Biden's economic agenda.

Futures earlier slipped for Japan but rose for Hong Kong. Australian stocks edged down, while U.S. equity futures fluctuated. Global stocks retreated last week in part on an outlook of diminishing central bank stimulus as officials pivot toward fighting inflation.

Risks pile up for millions of day traders buying India stocks

Nithin Kamath, the chief executive officer of India's largest online brokerage, estimates that his platform handles 10 to 12 million orders on the average day. They're increasingly from first-time investors under the age of 30, executing dozens of trades at lightning speed off their mobile phones.

Young investors like those on Kamath's Zerodha Broking -- which has come to be known as India's Robinhood -- helped drive its stock market to records this year, but many are now buying at a time when risks are building up.

A combination of colder weather, low wind and nuclear outages, combined with very expensive natural gas prices, saw daily power prices in Spain jump to a record while French equivalent rose to its highest level since a rare price peak in 2009.

With benchmark natural gas prices seen seven times higher than at the start of the year due hampered supplies from Russia, traders are bracing for even higher prices in the coming coldest winter months.

Need more proof that this is the year digital assets went mainstream? How about the fact that venture capital funds have poured about $30 billion into crypto, or more than in all previous years combined for the little more than decade-old technology.

As other established firms such as Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group and Polychain Capital bet on the next big crypto thing, all manner of experimental projects — a social media app that turns celebrities into tokens, a play-to-earn NFT game inspired by Elon Musk or a collectible consisting of a list of words — secured funding.

"After correcting for nearly 11 months, innovation stocks seem to have entered deep value territory," she wrote in a blog post she said was intended to share ARK's thought process. "We take advantage of volatility during corrections and concentrate our portfolios toward our highest conviction stocks."

On the global front, Nio plans to enter Germany and three other countries in Europe next year, Li said.

Despite a bullish 2022 outlook, Wilmington Trust's Meghan Shue expects the wild swings to ramp up as investors digest a less accommodative Federal Reserve and assess new risks tied to the Covid omicron variant.

"While we're overweight to equities, we're holding elevated cash because we think there are probably going to be more opportunities presenting themselves," the firm's head of investment strategy told CNBC on Friday. "Cash could be your friend over the coming months."

Analysis shows a three-year streak -- like the one now -- is uncommon, but not terribly out of the ordinary, occurring 11 times for data going back to 1927, and making another year of gains a toss-up. The longest-ever wining streak was the eight-year period from 1982 to 1989 (even with a dramatic crash in October 1987, the S&P 500 still eked out a gain).